Concepts in the Paradox

January has been an active month, with dead time between events starting to go back to back with things to do.

At work, I’ve ended up diving head first into SAN virtualization. I didn’t want to go this route for a another few months, but we’re evaluating SAN technology, and the research needs to be done quickly. This stuff isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and in fact it is pretty straight forward. LUNs here, WWNS there, sparse volumes and mirrors over there.

I finally heard back from David Snyder at SPUR, and he’s going to put me in touch with the transportation communications intern there. The idea is for me to do “online advocacy” for transit, something that I’m already knee deep in by nature. We’ll see where things go. SPUR’s membership fee was a whopping $65, but it is for a good cause. These folks seem to know what they are doing.

The car has been up for sale for almost 2 weeks now. I put it up on cars.com for $21750, but the only contacts I’ve gotten are other sales agencies wanting to list my auto for another $50. I hate to lower the price, it is already low compared to other cars for sale in the area, but every month it sits is another possible parking ticket or accident, plus deprecation and the insurance payments I have to make.

Speaking of parking tickets, the two citations I got from DPT came back after I wrote a very polite letter to the them. Their reply? Pay the $100 or find a cop to verify that the tags are current, have him sign off on the tickets, then submit $10 per ticket ($20) for “administrative fees” to have the citations written off. I about flipped my lid when I read that. The DPT brings in $40m a year, so I have little concept of why I must pay fees to have my fine waved. Such is the law, and such is yet another complaint letter for me to write. I’m getting good at writing them these days.

Finally, I went to the MacWorld expo this week. I ended up buying a keyboard cover, 2GB of RAM for my Mac Mini, and laid out the cash for an academic version of Adobe CS2 + Acrobat 8. It’s about time really, I’ve been suffering with The GIMP and I’d like to greatly improve the designs of my various blog sites. Now I have something more to learn, but it’s graphics, so it should be fun!